Pioneers in Medicine and Their Impact on Tuberculosis

Thomas M. Daniel

Thomas Daniel begins with three chapters on tuberculosis. The first looks
at medical history, at the role tuberculosis played in the development
of infectious disease theory, bacteriology, epidemiology and public
health, and molecular biology. The second covers the pathogenesis of
Mycobacterium tuberculosis, its course of disease, and its natural
history. And the third is a very brief history of the origins, spread,
containment and now revival of tuberculosis.

There follow six short biographies of key figures in the history of
tuberculosis, ordered chronologically.

René Théophile Hyacinthe Laennec was one of the founding fathers
of pathology, known for his development of the stethoscope and other
diagnostic tools. Extensive studies based on autopsies and inspection
of organs led him to recognition of tuberculosis as a single entity,
and he described the stages which had previously been attributed to
different diseases.

Heinrich Hermann Robert Koch was the father of bacteriology and infectious
disease theory, developing culture and staining techniques and carrying
out careful framing of hypotheses and testing. He worked on anthrax
and cholera as well as tuberculosis.

As New York health commissioner, Hermann Michael Biggs pushed through
both medical and political innovations which made him "the father of
modern public health in North America". His contributions to the fight
against tuberculosis included the provision of universal diagnostic
services and treatment and the introduction of systematic case reporting.

Clemens von Pirquet was an Austrian paediatrician who did important work
on allergies and the immune system. As part of his work on tuberculosis
he developed the tuberculin skin test still used for its diagnosis.

Wade Hampton Frost was an American epidemiologist who worked on acute
infectious diseases such as typhoid, poliomyelitis and influenza before
moving on to tuberculosis. He was a pioneer of quantitative methods,
with innovations in the use of household surveys, cohort studies, and
index cases.

Selman Abraham Waksman was a Jewish Ukrainian migrant to the United
States who became one of the founders of soil microbiology. Work on
actinomycetes lead to the discovery of streptomycin, which was "in the
van of the armamentarium of effective agents" against tuberculosis.

Daniel is a medical researcher, and acknowledges in his introduction
that he is "not a historian" but "an interpreter of medical history".
While he is dependent on secondary sources for much of the biographical
and historical material, however, he makes good use of excerpts from
contemporary publications, letters, et cetera. And he is clearly familiar
with the medical science. (In places his account is moderately technical,
and I found the twelve page glossary useful a few times.)

Pioneers in Medicine and Their Impact on Tuberculosis offers full,
if short, biographies which don't focus narrowly on their subjects'
work on tuberculosis. It is not a replacement for a general history of
the disease, but works well to set it in the context of broader medical
and social history.